In some telecommunication equipment, a plurality of circuit boards (also referred to as blades) may be connected to a common circuit board (also referred to as a backplane). Typically, a backplane includes circuitry for interconnecting the blades. By interconnecting the blades to one another, data may be passed directly from a source blade to one or more destination blades. Some backplanes are designed to comply with one or more standards, such as the Advanced Telecommunications Computer Architecture (ATCA) specification. It is to be appreciated connectivity between blades has become a limiting performance factor in an ATCA system. The central processing units (CPUs) and network processing units (NPUs) have increasing number of cores with each generation. Moreover, the manufacturers are typically adding hardware accelerator functions to improve performance of the CPUs and NPUs even further. As processing power of the blades have increased and with the increase in monitored traffic bandwidth, the backplane connectivity has become one of the primary performance bottlenecks in ATCA systems.